A flood of foreclosures in neighborhoods, cities and towns can cause everyone’s real estate equity to plunge. Some towns would like to step-in to protect their communities, but they can’t get the mortgage notes written down to affordable levels for contractual reasons. The solution: use eminent domain to claim the properties for the municipality, then renegotiate them on behalf of struggling homeowners. Ellen talks with the pre-eminent legal mind behind the emerging eminent domain stratagem, Cornell professor Robert Hockett, whose idea has been catching on in towns across America, including some of the biggest.

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San Francisco Supervisors vote this Tues. July 8th on a proposal to join Richmond!!! This is so exciting…it is just what Richmond needs to go ahead….and SF will be able to help save some homes from foreclosure too. Thanks for printing this today!

ErnieM posted: ” IT’S OUR MONEY WITH ELLEN BROWN – EMINENT DOMAIN TO THE RESCUE? – 07/02/14 A flood of foreclosures in neighborhoods, cities and towns can cause everyone’s real estate equity to plunge. Some towns would like to step-in to protect their communities” Ellen…wish I could share these on Facebook? Sandra Decker

[…] By ErnieM IT’S OUR MONEY WITH ELLEN BROWN – EMINENT DOMAIN TO THE RESCUE? – 07/02/14 A flood of foreclosures in neighborhoods, cities and towns can cause everyone’s real estate equity to plunge. Some towns would like to step-in to protect their communities, but they can’t get the mortgage notes written down to affordable levels for contractual reasons. The solution: […] …read more […]

“…but they can’t get the mortgage notes written down to affordable levels for contractual reasons….”
Quote Sheila Bair (Former FDIC Chairman),”How could things have deteriorated so quickly…? In a word, securitization.
…Working with a Wall Street investment bank, the issuer packages the mortgages together into ‘pools’ and divides the right to the cash flows of these mortgages into securities that are sold to investors…”
(“BULL BY THE HORNS”)

These contracts with the investors took away the rights of the lenders to modify the mortgages: they sold “the cash flows” for cash .
How could they get back the trillions of dollars they already spent so they could repurchase the MBSs ?
The Fed would be able to “fix” the modification problem with a simple strokes on a computer: Allow all to stay at market value, with loans at 3% for 40 years,period. 85% would stay, the other 15% would become welcomed ‘short sales’. END OF CRISES, stabilizing the housing industry, saving millions of jobs and even creating more jobs.
But if they were to reveal the banks made trillions of profit and the insurers of ‘the sold rights’ were unable to perform what they were paid to do, the Fed would have exposed-we are in a system that is flawed and may result in catastrophic failure.

I admire your work. I read your book Web of Debt 3 times and learned a lot from it. But I have a big question that I hope you can answer in one of those lectures you give on youtube; I realize you are a very busy person.

Why countries that issue their own currencies such as Cuba and Burma that totally bypassed the bankers, why such countries were not able to have more productive economies? Zimbabwe and Ecuador ended up using other countries currencies – Is it all monetary indiscipline and incompetence or something else? Why doesn’t the system work for them?

Cuba is easy: it was embargoed and blockaded and pariahsized economically by the U.S.! The global debt spider pounces on those who attempt to break free. Lucky those countries are, apparently, that they haven’t suffered the plights of Iraq and Libya!

Note that this modus operandi was applied to Japan pre-WWII as punishment for doing so well, to Germany (as testified by Benjamin Freedman and Winston Churchill), and to the USSR. This is my viewpoint, not necessarily Ellen Brown’s.